“The Bear Market Economics Phenomenon” is an observation of Political Economics. Wall Street Admits: ‘We Got Rich Off the Backs of Workers’ thus creating the Bear Market. The Bear Market is America's default war.
The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

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Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Price of Environmental Destruction? There Is None

The Price of Environmental Destruction? There Is None

Putting a price on nature becomes meaningless if we treat the ecosystems upon which we depend as mere commodities with a price for trading

by Andrew Simms

The economy is no stranger to creating its own fantasy world with little or no relation to the real one. We witnessed the damage that can cause when the banks thought they had stumbled on financial alchemy and could transform bad debt into good – economic base metal into gold.

Now it's possible that a much bigger error is coming to light. The rise and rise of global corporations lifted on a wave of apparent productivity gains may have been little more than a mask for the reckless liquidation of natural capital. It's as if we've been so distracted by our impressive speed of economic travel that we forgot to look at the fuel gauge or the cloud of smog left in our wake.

A new UN report estimates that accounting for the environmental damage of the world's 3,000 biggest companies would wipe out one-third of their profits. Any precise figure, however, is a matter of how risk is quantified and of where you draw the line. In 2006, for example, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), of which I am the policy director, looked at the oil companies BP and Shell, who together had recently reported profits of £25bn. By applying the Treasury's own estimates of the social and environmental cost of carbon emissions, we calculated that the total bill for those costs would reach £46.5bn, massively outweighing profits and plunging the companies into the red.

Yet in exercises like this, we quickly hit the paradox of environmental economics. By putting a price on nature, hopefully it makes it less likely that we will treat the world, and its natural resources, as if it were a business in liquidation. Yet there is a point when it becomes meaningless to treat the ecosystems upon which we depend as mere commodities with a price for trading. For example, what price would you put on the additional tonne of carbon which, when burned, triggers irreversible, catastrophic climate change? Who would have the right to even consider selling off the climate upon which civilisation depends? The avoidance of such damage is literally priceless.

If that sounds dramatic, consider that last September a large, international group of scientists published a paper in the journal Nature which identified nine key planetary boundaries for key biological systems upon which we depend. They found that we had already transgressed three of those, and were on the cusp of several others. All are potential points of no return as such complex systems begin interacting.

The huge advantage of the UN work is that it attempts to improve the feedback system between the economy and its ultimate parent company, the biosphere. Better risk assessment and value measurement is essential to help prevent what happened to banks happening to the planet.

The concept of a balanced budget, so loved by conservatives in relation to finance and spending, seems to be an alien concept when the consumption of natural resources and the production of waste is concerned. Yet it is far more important to achieve a balanced environmental budget than an economic one. You can always print more money, but you can't print more planet. As John Ruskin put it, "There is no wealth but life."

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The Bear Marketplace

The Bear Market Dynamic

Our faith in capitalistic institutions promotes the pretense of democracy, while it delivers plutocracy, corporate fascism, and militarism. Similarly, imprudent belief in the American Dream induces people to behave in ways that promote the welfare of those in power rather than the perspectives of those of us struggling to be free. Belief in this discredited notion keeps workers from organizing against their oppressors.

Wouldn't universal health care for all, or at least a public option for those who have been exposed, namely all U.S. citizens, be a sim...

“Bear Market Economics” is an expression of Political Economics, an interdisciplinary field focusing on the non-market, collective, and political activity of individuals and organizations. Specific fields of inquiry include regulation, distributive politics, elections, corporate politics, public policy, social welfare, scientific and science policy, political participation and collective action, interest groups, constitutional choice, legislative behavior and organization, judicial institutions, bureaucracies, comparative institutions, cooperative political economy, macro political economy, allocation of resources, the environment, ecology, law and economics, business and government, how markets affect and impact the public and the commons. The orientation to these topics tends to be positive rather than normative.

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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

The American Capitalist Way

Capitalism is preferentially identified by its euphemisms: "Free Enterprise," "market system," "private enterprise." "the American Way," etc. Overt and pervasive partisanship in support of capitalism is not regarded by the American media as an ideological bias negating professional "objectivity" but rather comparable to the serene acceptance of natural laws.